This invention relates to a hip rafter to corner plate connection; most commonly occurring in wood frame buildings having a stick-framed roof of either dimensional lumber or plywood I-rafters. The invention may be used in traditional hip roofs which is one of the four basic roof shapes, or it may be used in roofs which are a combination of the basic shapes.
A hip is defined as the outside corner where two planes of a roof meet. It is comprised of a hip rafter at the corner and jack rafters from the hip to the eave. The hip rafter is supported at its lower end by the wall at plate level (or by a post) and at its upper end by the ridge (or by a wall).
Sheet metal connectors for joining common rafters to wood top plate members have been in use for some time and come in many different configurations. There is, however, only one commercially available connector known to applicant for joining hip rafters to corner plates and it was granted to Tyrell T. Gilb Aug. 17, 1993 for Rafter-to-Corner Plate Connection, U.S. Pat. No. 5,236,273. The Gilb connector, however, if used in a building with a right angled corner requires that the corner of the wood lower corner plate and the wood top plate be bevel cut. In addition, the Gilb connector gives minimal lateral support to prevent overturning to the hip rafter. A further limitation of Gilb is that the connector cannot be installed after the hip rafter has been nailed to the top plates.
The rafter-to-corner plate connectors taught by a few patents, none of which are known to be commercially available, are considered impractical because they are either too costly to manufacture or are incapable of handling the many different rafter slope angles.
The current practice of many roofing contractors is to use a Simpson hurricane tie or twist strap and flatten the 90 degree bend to a 45 degree bend to accommodate the rafter. This practice is costly because of the additional labor cost in bending the metal on the job and does not provide an architecturally aesthetic solution.